When we started out, I thought the whole company
just had a ten percent chance of success of surviving at all.
So, uh, I find it quite
[inaudible]
and a great honor to be working with NASA to restore
spaceflight, orbital spaceflight to, to America.
"Did you pitch to the Air Force Starship, and do you plan on"
"pitching it out to NASA for its lunar lander system?"
At this point we're basically just keeping NASA
and the Air Force informed regarding Starship.
But the goals of Starship aren't necessarily...
Really, so they're like, they're pretty...
They're really off-scale...
They're on a different level.
And so I think we need to make more progress with Starship
in order to establish credibility with potential customers
like NASA and the Air Force.
[offscreen] "Thank you guys"
In fact, I'm headed to Boca after this.
"Oh, cool."
So it's the first thing that I'm going to go work on
is Starship production later today.
"Cool, I hope some pictures..."
"ELON DOES THE PRESS DESERVE A DANCE TODAY?"
[laughter, groans]
I can't set these expectations of dancing constantly.
I'm not that good of a dancer.
I haven't had time to go, like, work on my skills...
"DANCE!"
Nope! Nooo!
"DANCE!" "DANCE!" "DANCE!" "DANCE!"
I am not your dancing puppet!
I tell you what
After crew launch, 100%.
[laughter]
Alright, it's good to see everyone...
It's, it's a...
Now, I'm personally super fired up and excited
and I think it feels like you guys are too, the public.
You know, it's just going to be wonderful to get astronauts back
into orbit from American soil after almost a decade
of not being able to do so.
I think that's just super exciting.
And like I said, with some technology advances.
You know, like with respect to the abort system and a few other things.
It'll be on a booster that's reusable and a spacecraft that is reusable.
So the only part that isn't for Falcon/Dragon
is the upper stage and the trunk.
So that's still a very big percentage of reusability.
And I keep saying reusability, reusability,
but really this reusability is extremely fundamental to revolutionizing space.
As it would be if it was aircraft, or cars, or bicycles, or horses.
Everything. You really want them to be reusable.
And then, and get the costs all the way down
to simply reload propellant and fly again.
Just like an aircraft.
And that's really what's going to open up space for the average person.
"Are you in talks with NASA to make Crew Dragon reusable for humans?"
We have been in discussions with NASA about this for quite some time
and my understanding is NASA is very open to this.
It's subject to obviously a lot of additional testing and verification.
What does it take to make it reusable for humans to fly it again?
Well Crew Dragon especially, even more than Dragon 1, or Cargo Dragon,
is really designed with reusability in mind.
So it has a much more, like, the propulsion section is essentially waterproof.
And it even has bilge pumps in the propulsion section
which rings the pressurized section like a doughnut at the bottom.
So...
We've already taken great steps to improve the reusability of
Crew Dragon over Cargo Dragon.
And so I think it's for sure way easier to reuse,
But reusability is of course contingent on support from NASA.
But obviously the Space Shuttle orbiter was reusable.
And so NASA is familiar with the notion of reusability.
But Crew Dragon is designed to be easily reusable.
So with minimal refurbishment and with, you know, essentially
it's designed to be rapidly and almost completely reusable
in the case of Crew Dragon, which would be great for
lowering costs and improving launch rate.
And then the booster, obviously we've proved many times
that the booster is reusable.
The only thing that's vexing is that upper stage, of Falcon,
which is not reusable.
But unfortunately we just don't have the payload capability
to reuse the upper stage with Falcon.
We will with Starship.
We've got an integrated upper stage and nosecone or fairing.
That is designed to be fully reusable from the beginning.
And it has, it's also quite a big vehicle.
A very big vehicle, obviously.
So I'm hopeful there's going to be progress with Starship
and that NASA, DoD, and others will consider using that vehicle.
But there will be significant overlap between Falcon 9,
Falcon Heavy, Crew Dragon, and Starship,
to make sure Starship is really ready and been accepted by our customers
before we retire the existing fleet of vehicles.
"Do you have an updated timeline for hops on Starship"
"and when you expect to go to orbit for the first time?"
Ahh, [inaudible]. [laughter]
I think we'll do, we'll do a more comprehensive
update on Starship in the future. But the...
I think we're making very good progress on the Raptor engine.
We're at serial number 20 of the Raptor engine.
We've completed production on that.
And the production rate of Raptors is improving significantly.
As well as we're making a number of design improvements to the Raptor engine.
So each serial number has some design improvements.
All the way up through, I think, probably serial number 50.
And so I think that Raptor is going extremely well.
The primary structure is slower.
And that's actually part of the reason I'm going to head out to Boca later today,
to just work on some of the primary structure engineering issues.
Especially the domes.
Yeah, when you are engaged in designing and building rockets,
these things that seem perhaps trivial
or not that important to the public or the uninitiated
are actually incredibly difficult.
Getting the domes right on the propellant tanks is one of the most difficult things.
It's just a dome, like, how hard could it be? But it's...
It's hard.
And then getting the interfaces between the tank and the interstage
or skirt that connects it to the booster.
And then the interface from the tanks to the nosecone or fairing.
The body flap control surfaces.
The landing gear, or landing legs.
The heat shield.
Just general operations.
And then of course, for Starship,
being able to successfully achieve on orbit refilling is extremely important.
But that's actually an example of where our work
with docking with the Space Station is actually incredibly helpful.
You see, one of the fundamental technologies needed to go to Mars,
orbital refilling, is extremely important.
That means you need to be able to do precision docking in orbit.
And our work with the Space Station, precision docking with the Space Station
actually has helped us solve that very difficult problem
of docking in orbit with precision, reliably every time.
But now we need to do it with two giant spaceships.
It's like a space station docking to a space station.
But I am very excited about the potential of Starship,
and I think it's going to be something that can really
have a profound step-change effect on humanity's ability to go beyond Earth.
Thank you.